Berhanu
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Amharic (Ethiopia): 'his light'
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 14 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Berhanu is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Ethiopia than in any other country, where it is the 16th most common surname.
- ETEthiopia≈1 in 520(inferred from the name graph)
- ISIceland≈1 in 20K
- SESweden≈1 in 97Kfew records
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Ethiopia (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 145 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 516 (inferred from the name graph)
≈260,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Ethiopia, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Amharic (Ethiopia): 'his light'
Cited for this meaning 1
- African Names
Where in the world
(measured from records)Berhanu counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ET Ethiopia | #16 | ≈260,000 est. | ≈1 in 516 | listed | Berhanu | 38 |
| US United States | — | 512 | 1 in 650K | 810 | Berhanu | 145 |
| SE Sweden | — | ≈110 est. | ≈1 in 97K | 78 | Berhanu | 11 |
| ZA South Africa | — | ≈99 est. | ≈1 in 644K | — | Berhanu | 13 |
| ME Montenegro | #962 | ≈89 est. | ≈1 in 7K | — | Berhanu | 1 |
| LS Lesotho | — | ≈20 est. | ≈1 in 116K | — | Berhanu | 1 |
| IS Iceland | — | ≈20 est. | ≈1 in 20K | listed | — | — |
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses
(measured from records)Berhanu is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
his light.
as a nameAfrican Names
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Berhanu Dinkab. 1935ETEthiopian diplomat and economist
- Berhanu Negab. 1958ETEthiopian politician
- Birhan Getahunb. 1991ETnot in their usual namerunner
- Berhanu Shiferawb. 1993ETEthiopian male long-distance runner
- Birhanu Legeseb. 1994ETnot in their usual nameEthiopian long-distance runner
- Birhan Nebebewb. 1994ETnot in their usual nameEthiopian male long-distance runner
- Berhanu Boru Bifftub. 2000researcher
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them
(machine-generated)Evidence
(measured from records)26 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 14 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Berhanu mean, and where does it come from?
- Amharic (Ethiopia): 'his light' Recorded by African Names.
- In which country does Berhanu have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 256 thousand people named Berhanu in Ethiopia, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled berhanu.
- How common is the name Berhanu?
- In the United States, the national register counted 512 people named Berhanu in 2010, about 1 in 650 thousand residents.
- How common is Berhanu compared with other names?
- In Ethiopia, Berhanu is the 16th most common surname of 22,571 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Berhanu?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/berhanuThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Berhanu” — the 16th most common surname in Ethiopia. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.